Comment by dieggsy

Comment by dieggsy 5 days ago

Are you by chance a Common Lisp developer? If not, you may like it (well, judging only by your praise of stability).

Completely sidestepping any debate about the language design, ease of use, quality of the standard library, size of community, etc... one of its strengths these days is that standard code basically remains functional "indefinitely", since the standard is effectively frozen. Of course, this requires implementation support, but there are lots of actively maintained and even newer options popping up.

And because extensibility is baked into the standard, the language (or its usage) can "evolve" through libraries in a backwards compatible way, at least a little more so than many other languages (e.g. syntax and object system extension; notable example: Coalton).

Of course there are caveats (like true, performant async programming) and it seems to be a fairly polarizing language in both directions; "best thing since sliced bread!" and "how massively overrated and annoying to use!". But it seems to fit your description decently at least among the software I use or know of.

feoren 5 days ago

I respect and understand the appeal of LISP. It is a great example of code not having to change all the time. I personally haven't had a compelling reason to use it (post college), but I'm glad I learned it and I wouldn't be averse to taking a job that required it.

While writing "timeless" code is certainly an ideal of mine, it also competes with the ideals of writing useful code that does useful things for my employer or the goals of my hobby project, and I'm not sure "getting actual useful things done" is necessarily LISP's strong suit, although I'm sure I'm ruffling feathers by saying so. I like more modern programming languages for other reasons, but their propensity to make backward-incompatible changes is definitely a point of frustration for me. Languages improving in backward-compatible ways is generally a good thing; your code can still be relatively "timeless" in such an environment. Some languages walk this line better than others.

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lycopodiopsida 4 days ago

I think, the "useful" part is more covered by libraries than everything else, and the stability and flexibility of the core language certainly helps with that. Common Lisp is just not very popular (as every lisp) and does not have a very big ecosystem, that's it.
Another point for stability is about how much a runtime can achieve if it is constantly improved over decades. Look where SBCL, a low-headcount project, is these days.
We should be very vigilant and ask for every "innovation" whether it is truly one. I think it is fair to assume for every person working in this industry for decades that the opinion would be that most innovations are just fads, hype and resume-driven development - the rest could be as well implemented as a library on top of something existing. The most progress we've had was in tooling (rust, go) which does not require language changes per se.
I think, the frustrating part about modern stacks is not the overwhelming amount of novelty, it is just that it feels like useless churn and the solutions are still as mediocre or even worse that what we've had before.

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